Thom McAn

the shoe salesman guarded by
his sister and two other, unrelated women,
glowering and adjusting the chains

.....so many years past, and
the shoeboxes long since gone
and him in his blue shirt,

sneaking cigarettes in the storeroom....
now craters pock the ground and the
rhythmic grinding of machinery marks

the time. The trees all gone, from
the stumps upward, the worst insult,
this wholesale holocaust, the

smoothing of ground to make it
asphalt-ready, malleable